ISTR Fourth International Conference Dublin, Ireland / July 5-8, 2000 The Third Sector: For What and For Whom?

Catherine Brennan cabrenna@tcd.ie
Tony McCashin

In Ireland the contribution of the voluntary sector to the formulation of social policy is now explicitly recognised. Of particular importance is the fact that this sector now constitutes one of the four pillars of Social Partnership and has been party to the negotiations on Partnership 2000 and more recently the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness.

In 1997 the Department of Social Studies was approached by the Society of Saint Vincent De Paul (SVP) to start a process aimed at formulating the views of the Society on a range of relevant issues in national social policy. In general terms the research commissioned by the SVP was aimed at devising a social policy document that would represent the concerns and the experiences of its local conference membership and enable the Society to reflect this information back to statutory and other agencies through its participation in various national policy making fora.

The most important aspect of this project from the perspective of the SVP's National Council was to get a clear mandate from its grassroots membership to pursue a greater role in national social policy formulation. One of the more interesting findings was that while the general membership does aspire to an enhanced role in national social policy matters, there is little consensus on how best this can be achieved. The vast majority of membership juxtapose their preference for a greater input to national social policy making with a firm adherence to the Society's traditional mode of working on a one-to-one basis with clients. This suggests that for the Society to develop a national social policy role with support from its members will require a difficult balancing act. It means on the one hand, engaging in more policy work, lobbying, advocacy and so on, while on the other not abandoning its commitment to confidential casework with individual clients.

This paper is based on fieldwork undertaken in two phases. First a series of twenty two focus group sessions were conducted in which the members and clients of some forty eight local conferences were consulted. The second phase involved a national postal survey of all local conferences covering areas such as membership, activities and opinions of conference presidents on a range of social policy topics. Five hundred and ninety useable questionnaires were received giving a highly satisfactory response rate of 70 per cent.

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